Email marketing is all about relevance – sending the right message to the right person at the right time, and in the right format. There are multiple strategies marketers can use to create relevant campaigns and drive email performance, but subscriber-level data will always play an important role
With the increase in subscribers using their mobile devices to view email, it is increasingly important to gain access to data that can tell you what percentage of your subscribers are doing this and with what type of device. This should, in turn, affect what you send to these subscribers and how you send it.
Return Path’s 'Email on the Move: The Future of Mobile Messaging' study reveals key data about how mobile email viewership is increasing and provides insight on how, where and in what technological environment people view email messages. This is a great tool to use as you map out your mobile strategy. In addition, we recommend that you keep a few best practices in mind:
• Timing is Everything
When it comes to email and mobile devices, it’s not always about what you say with your content, but when your subscribers read it. Increased mobile email viewership means that people can be reading your email from just about anywhere, at any time of the day.
Return Path’s study shows that mobile email viewership increases over the weekend. If, for example, you’re looking to use email to drive store traffic, you may want to consider sending deals and discounts during the weekend, when subscribers are out and about in their communities and ready to shop. Conversely, we learned that desktop usage increases during the work week. This is likely the better time for longer newsletters or a more time-intensive call-to-action, like downloads or long forms.
• Give Subscribers Control
One of the easiest ways to figure out what the subscriber wants is to let them tell you. By offering customised options to your subscribers, they can tell you exactly how they experience your emails (including optimisation for their mobile and tablet devices) and how often they would like your messages to be delivered. Offering subscription and rendering options as part of a preference center is a win-win scenario: the subscriber tells you what they want and you give it to them.
• Have Good Bones
An email with image rendering failures is never going to be relevant to the subscriber if they don’t know what you are trying to say. It’s more likely to be, ignored and deleted as unread, unsubscribed from or generally “tuned out.” All of this will negatively impact your response and deliverability rates. Pay attention to what your messages look like with images on and off and make sure the most important information in the message (the headline and call-to-action) isn’t part of an image.
By factoring in mobile email data and improving the relevancy of your messages, you will increase not only engagement and response rates, but deliverability. The key is to send messages that your subscriber base wants to read, when they want to read it, and optimised for the devices and environments they will read it in.